Cole
Keepers of the Lake
Emilia Hartley
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, places, businesses and incidents are from the author’s imagination, or they are used fictitiously and are definitely fictionalized. Any trademarks or pictures herein are not authorized by the trademark owners and do not in any way mean the work is sponsored by or associated with the trademark owners. Any trademarks or pictures used are specifically in a descriptive capacity.
Emilia Hartley © Copyright 2021
Contents
Emilia’s Heartlies
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Coming Soon!
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1
Cole Barton found himself alone in the dark, sitting on the porch of his cabin with a beer in one hand and his eyes on the gleaming surface of Lake Superior. Part of him wondered what the local pack was up to. He hoped the young blonde wolf shifter was doing better. The girl had a mate who was steady and thoughtful. She didn’t need Cole’s worrying.
No one needed Cole. It was just him and the lake. Him and the past he bore upon his back.
“Good night for a dark moon,” a female voice said. Her voice was sultry as always, but time had added a little gravel to it.
“What are you doing here, Sybil? You aren’t bound to me or the others anymore.”
The shape of a woman appeared, climbing the shore toward him. Her gray hair was piled atop her head in a messy bun. She took a long drag off a cigarette. The end shone hot in the dark before she exhaled a plume of smoke. When she reached the porch, she leaned over Cole and flicked the nearby electric lantern.
White light spilled over them. Cole hissed and leaned away from it, but Sybil shook her head.
“Living in the darkness isn’t going to get you anywhere.”
He shrugged. “I don’t have anywhere to go.”
“You keep telling yourself lies. That’s why I’m on your doorstep at three in the morning.”
He sighed, heavy with guilt. Was it three AM already? Why was this woman not in bed? Sybil would be celebrating her 103rd birthday soon, and while her witchcraft kept her aging gracefully, it didn’t make her immortal. So few creatures in this world were truly immortal.
“You shouldn’t be here.”
“My dreams told me I should pay you a visit. They said before morning. That way you would know what you needed to know in time.”
“Well, that’s awful fucking cryptic,” he said as he rolled his eyes in her direction.
“I’d leave, but this is more for my benefit than it is yours. I need to sleep at night and if I don’t tell you what you need to know, the dreams will keep waking me at all hours.”
Cole grunted. He wished she hadn’t crawled out of bed for him, but he secretly liked having company. He pushed out of the chair and slunk inside to grab a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. Sybil made a sound of thanks when he returned. She put out her cigarette as he poured the whiskey.
The air crackled when she pulled the long deck of cards from her pocket. The deck was the length of her hands, from wrist to fingertip. When she began shuffling them, they became a blur of magic and mystery. His heart heaved and then settled.
Whatever it was Sybil came to tell him, he was ready. Cole lived in preparation for the worst. It was why he warned the local pack away from the lake. He patrolled every day to keep people from stumbling into the horror that he’d lived through ten years ago.
Sybil, sitting sideways in her chair, turned over the first card and set it on the table between the two glasses of whiskey. The images on them always changed. It showed a dragon over the lake, but it wasn’t any beast Cole recognized. The underside of the beast was dark, but the light above it illuminated a strip of gold.
Cole leaned back in his seat and sipped his whiskey. Sybil tried to catch his eye, probably to see if he knew anything about the image on the card. Annoyed that she couldn’t gauge his reaction, she huffed and drew the next card. His heart shuddered. The magic was trying to make him look at it, but he fought against it.
Something about this frightened him. He should have seen the monster over his lake, a portent of what they all knew would eventually happen. But the cards hadn’t shown him the monster. What would this next card reveal?
When Sybil made a sound like a bitter laugh, Cole finally looked. On the card was his cabin. Instead of turned to rubble, the cabin was illuminated from the inside and the door was open.
“Maybe I was right to come over,” Sybil commented. “Looks like you need to start letting people in.”
“Never,” Cole growled. “You know this place isn’t safe.”
Syble gave him an exasperated glare. “It’s not right for you to sit up here on your own for the rest of your life, either. The cards want to warn you that you can’t do that forever. Maybe you should listen to them. My magic saved your ass once before.”
“These are just cards. This isn’t anything like ten years ago, and you know it.”
Sybil seemed close to ripping his hair out. The witch jammed her hand into her pocket, yanked out another cigarette, and lit it. She blew the smoke into his face, but he was a dragon. It didn’t bother him. What did bother him was the idea that each stick was slowly burning away what was left of her life.
“Put that out. Finish drawing your cards.”
Sybil didn’t put out the cigarette, but she did pull another card. At first, it was the image of a woman, standing outside his cabin. But as he stared at it, the image morphed until he was there, standing beside her.
Sybil cackled with delight. “Looks like the universe is setting you up on a blind date!”
“I don’t get a mate, Syb. I would say it’s not in the cards, but your cards seem to be confused.”
“Think whatever you want, but I relayed the message. It’s up to you to do whatever you want with it. If you want to let fate smack you in the ass, then so be it. I’ll be around more often because this will be a good show.”
She was wrong. No one was coming here because Cole kept everyone away from this side of the lake. It was his duty. His burden.
2
Jude wanted to reach through the phone and throttle her cousin. There was a reason she was kept away from the mountain range in Colorado. Mostly because her family was full of arrogant pricks who thought they could order her around.
“I get it Jasper,” she growled into the cell phone pressed to her ear. “But when you said you were booking me a private getaway; I didn’t think it would be this private.”
On her flight from Colorado to Michigan, she’d dreamt of spas. She’d yearned for a full body massage, time near a pool where a cute guy might buy her a drink and invite her to his room. She was not imagining this ramshackle… shack!
“Stop complaining,” Jasper commanded. The power of his voice rolled over her. He could pull that crap with his knights, but she was blood.
Jude was a gold dragon
.
“Fine,” he sighed when she starved him with silence. “Just stay there for now and in the meantime, I’ll look for better accommodations. This is the closest to where the dragons went missing, so...”
“So, you thought it’d be smart. I don’t care what you thought of it. I expect you to use the money you make off that bank of yours to put me up somewhere nice if I’m going to be working for you.”
When she heard her cousin’s mate calling to him in the background, Jude hung up. She jammed her phone in her pocket, rolled her shoulders, and turned to the cabin behind her. Her beast stirred. It prowled inside her, taking in their new surroundings. It always did this when she moved to a new place, which she’d done more often than she could count, but something felt different this time.
Jude couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but the beast seemed…pleased. Which only annoyed Jude even more. Her dragon shouldn’t like this place. Not when there were four-star resorts nearby that offered room service that she could put on Jasper’s tab. A year ago, Aurum Bank had been failing. Now, with Jasper at the head and his court of dragons helping him, the bank had experienced a resurgence.
Now people all across the country carried Aurum credit cards in their wallets. Jasper could have put her into a four-star resort for a month and not blinked an eye. Jude, on the other hand, didn’t work for the bank, and she wasn’t a part of her cousin’s court because her dragon was too rowdy. Her bank account was slim to empty.
She would have to deal with the tiny cabin until Jasper got back to her.
She bent to pick up her bags when her neighbor slammed his door behind him. He was tall, had dark hair that flopped over his eyes, and stormed away like he was on a mission. She watched him go and her dragon began squirming.
Follow him, it whispered.
Instead, Jude watched him go. His jeans hugged his butt perfectly. When he stopped near his truck and glanced over his shoulder, his piercing eyes fell on her. His gaze made her stomach flip. She looked him up and down and felt him do the same to her. Just as she thought he was going to get into his truck and drive away, she dropped her bags.
It was now or never. Jasper sent her here to do a job, and she might as well do it. Approaching her sexy neighbor had nothing to do with his fine ass or his alluring eyes. At least, that was what she told herself.
She waved to him. His lips drew back in an annoyed snarl, but she didn’t stop. He could eat her ass, for all she cared. Jude’s beast was arrogant, with the strength to back it up. Sometimes the creature’s attitude bled over into her. It’d led to more than her fair share of fights over the course of her youth, explaining the scar that cut through her left eyebrow.
She had Jasper to thank for that one.
“Excuse me, sir. I have a few questions for you!”
He pushed away from his truck and stormed toward her. She wondered if he did everything with that same kind of intense energy. It made her stomach tighten and her beast purr.
He stepped closer and his scent washed over her. Just like she thought, he was a dragon, too. His beast smelled of fresh water and stone, so different from the metallic beasts she’d grown up around.
“You’re trespassing,” he growled.
She looked back at the cabin Jasper had booked for her and shook her head. “Nope. I have a lease. Signed it myself.”
His brows furrowed and cast a shadow over his eyes. He was an angry one. She wondered what he had to be so angry about. Jude knew her lease was legit. She’d met with the landowner and everything.
“Let me see it.” He thrust out his hand as if she would drop a contract into his palm.
She held it up for him, not letting him hold it. A man like this would burn it given the chance. Was this his territory? If his dragon had claimed the area and Sybil had put Jude in danger, Jude was going to have a very heated talk with the woman.
In the end, the man grunted. “Damn witch.”
Jude cocked her head. “What did you say?”
She thought he was calling her names until he pointed to Sybil’s name on the contract. Ah, that made sense. The woman had emitted…some strange vibes. Jude had never met a witch in her life, but she’d heard of dragons and witches living together. Especially since witch magic made hiding dragons much easier.
Which meant that her new landlord might know about why Jude had been sent here. She would have to pay the witch another visit. After she interrogated tall, dark, and eternally disgruntled.
“I’m Jude Drake. Nice to meet you. Could you spare a handful of minutes to talk?”
His glare was hot. Even if he looked pissed, the heat of it made her want to start taking her clothes off. She shook herself and scowled. That had to be her beast’s hormones. The damn thing would go crazy from time to time. She’d satisfied it with human men up until now.
The only problem was that they were fragile. Oh, and they didn’t have half the heat of this guy. If human men were sparklers, this guy was a full-blown fireworks display. She bet he could set off a few inside her, too.
“Go back to Colorado, Drake.”
“Uhm, no. Can’t do that.”
His growl might have forced any other shifter to quake. Jude’s beast rose and filled her eyes. The world around her changed, her dragon’s sight making everything sharper as her eyes shifted.
“I said leave,” the man tried again.
“You are a broken record. I get it, you can’t help me. Not right now. But if you ever change your mind, I’ll be over here in my…” Jude couldn’t call that a cabin. It was barely a shed. The years had not been kind to it, even if the witch had taken care to clean it and replace the curtains. In the end, she just gestured vaguely in the direction of her new home.
Cole was going to kill the witch. They hadn’t signed the cabins over to her for her to start renting them out to every shifter who wanted to swing by. Cole’s job was to protect the lake from intruders. He couldn’t do that if the shore was covered in tourists.
If Sybil needed more money, he would give it to her. She didn’t have to do this.
He stopped. The night before, Sybil had visited him with a claim that her dreams were telling her something. It hadn’t been her dreams that woke her, but her conscience. He growled. The witch had known that the woman would be coming. The cards had only been a lure to make Cole believe it was the work of fate and not a contract.
Which only made him angrier. He roared and kicked a stone by the road. It went flying through the air. The woman behind him didn’t stop as she brought her bags into the cabin.
She was a dragon, too. A Drake. Her clan ruled the Colorado mountains with an Arthurian system. The gold dragon was their king. The crown was passed down from one generation to the other. Other metallic dragons served in the king’s court, while chromatic dragons were subjects.
What Cole couldn’t figure out was why a Drake wanted anything to do with him. Cole’s clan was broken. They had been a strong group of dragons once upon a time, but that was no more. If the new golden king was looking for allies, he wouldn’t find them here.
Cole left the lake shore, far away from the dragon woman’s sight, and shifted. His beast burst from the woods, the sun ahead of him so the woman behind would see nothing more than a silhouette. He banked toward the park and the trail that stretched a little too close to his shore. He swooped over it, making sure shifters and humans stayed away.
Then, when he was sure no one else would stumble onto his territory, he turned toward Sybil’s cabin.
3
Jude tried to commit herself to her work, but the mobile hot spot on her phone was being wonky, and her internet connection was cutting out every few minutes or so. She was supposed to be investigating what happened to the local dragon clan because her cousin wanted to protect every dragon in the country.
While she didn’t think Jasper’s rule could stretch that far, Jude was eager for a reason to escape Colorado. It wasn’t her home. She’d never really had one, but being surrounded
by fellow dragons only reminded her that she didn’t belong there. Everyone was so happy, and their lives were moving forward, while Jude’s life felt stationary despite her roving life.
Doing this little bit of investigative work for Jasper was refreshing. She might have pitched a fit over the accommodations, but as long as she didn’t have to deal with Ashton’s antics or listen to Ryker’s death metal, then she was content.
For the millionth time, she pulled back the nearby curtain to see if her neighbor had come back. He’d never told her his name, but she was going to get it out of him one way or another. If Jasper was going to make her stay in this stupid cabin, then she was going to make the best of it. And her hot neighbor was definitely the best of it.
She thought of his beast again, the way it burst into the air earlier. He was a massive creature, like her. The other female dragons in Colorado had been small. The only one nearly her size had been Cora, Jasper’s new mate. Even still, Jude felt off. She didn’t feel like one of the mates. She didn’t feel like a servant.
Unable to keep her thoughts straight, she closed her laptop and tossed it onto the nearby bed. Work could wait. Her stomach was grumbling and there was nothing in the cabin that would satisfy her beast. She needed something more than mustard and ketchup. The chips in her car weren’t going to cut it either.
She grabbed the keys and went exploring. Every now and then, her GPS cut out. She gave up on it when she reached town, choosing to pull over and ask for the best restaurant in town. Jude flagged down a pedestrian. The young woman had shoulder length hair, an award-winning smile, and a paperback romance novel in her hand. Immediately, the young woman suggested a café downtown.
Cole Page 1
